Booking Links Alone Won’t Cut It – Why This Twitter Argument Should Make You Rethink Your Scheduling Tool

I was chatting with a friend recently who’s an AE at an enterprise SaaS company, and asked him how he went about scheduling meetings with his prospects. 

Even though his whole team has paid access to a popular scheduling tool, I was super surprised to hear that he was still sending emails like this:

“Dude, why are you still sending these emails?” I asked, “Can’t you just send them your booking link?”

“Nah, people are too busy.” He said, “They barely have time to read my email, let alone click a link to a look at my calendar.”

“It’s easier for me to just offer a few times. That takes the work out of it for them.”

I found this really interesting. 

As an obvious advocate of automated scheduling, I always just assumed that booking links were better than trying to coordinate a meeting the old fashioned way. 

But as I started to dig in, I realized that a number of revenue professionals felt the same way. Apparently booking links are seen by some prospects as bad etiquette in the business world. 

Booking Etiquette – Curated tweets by JasonOak

The more you think about it, the more this makes sense. 

Even though we send booking links with the intention of making life easier for everyone, they have this way of making the sales process feel less personal. Even rude. 

The reality is that booking links alone won’t cut it anymore. 

But does this mean we need to schedule meetings manually in order to make them feel personalized. Of course not! You just need the right tools for every scenario. 

In the rest of this post, we’ll highlight some of the most common scheduling scenarios and what tools you should be using in order to book more meetings make more money. 

Coordinating meetings with prospects over email 

This is the big one for most sales reps. After all, email is the primary form of communication for sales reps trying to book meetings. 

When it comes to scheduling over email, look no further than Suggested Times. With the Chili Piper extension, you can embed smart suggested times in the body of your email. 

We automatically retrieve your prospect’s contact data from the email, so when they click a time it automatically books the meeting. No additional steps required. 

We actually ran an A/B test on sending Suggested Times vs booking links and saw a 13x increase in the number of people who booked.

Booking meetings organically from your signature

If you thought this article was telling you to throw away your booking link, you’d be wrong. There is 100% a time and place for booking links. For one, they are a great way to book meetings organically from your email signature. 

As a sales rep you send hundreds of emails every month. Some get acted on immediately, while others germinate in your prospect’s inbox, waiting to blossom into a beautiful meeting.

In these cases, it always helps to have a booking link embedded into every email you send. Your signature is a perfect spot for this. 

No matter when a prospect decides to hop back into an active sales cycle, your booking link is at the ready. 

Booking over the phone 

If you’re on the phone with a prospect who’s ready to book a follow-up meeting, you’d be silly to not book it on the spot. Waiting until after the call to schedule over email will undoubtedly result in some drop-off. 

But you also need a fast way to book meetings in real-time without sacrificing any automated perks like reminders and auto-populated conference details. 

That’s where Instant Booker comes in handy. With our browser extension, you can access our Instant Booker tool from any screen and book meetings in seconds. 

Booking from marketing emails

Here’s another great use case for booking links, but with a twist. 

Booking links make a great CTA in a marketing campaign as a way to convert marketing leads into qualified meetings. 

With Chili Piper you can go a step further with smart booking links that automatically retrieve a prospects email address and route them to the correct AE calendar. 

When your prospect clicks an available time, they are instantly booked.

Booking on your website 

If you’re still following up with inbound leads manually to book meetings, you are missing out on some serious revenue. 

Based on before and after research with our customers, about 40% of inbound leads that request a demo on your website actually convert into a booked meeting. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, but the main one is slow lead response times. 

With our Concierge tool, you can convert inbound leads into qualified meetings instantly. Instead of worrying about speed to lead, you can switch to instant inbound and double your inbound revenue. 

On average, companies convert twice as many inbound leads into meetings after implementing Concierge. Click here to see a preview of what it could look like on your website. 

Booking from inside your app

Automated scheduling can help you drive upsell and reduce churn too. The key is making it easy for your customers to book meetings instantly, from inside your application. 

This could be for an upsell use case (“Click here to talk to sales about our premium plan”), an account management use case (“Click here to chat about this new feature”), or a support use case (“Click here for live help”).

Instead of kicking customers to a web form or chat widget, you can embed our Concierge tool inside your application and let them book a meeting or start a live call instantly. 

We can tap into your application API to retrieve a user’s email address, route them to the correct account owner, and book the meeting in one click. 

Automate your scheduling, but make it feel personal 

Throwing your booking link at everyone you meet isn’t the way to build strong relationships and close deals, but it also doesn’t mean you have to subject yourself (and your customers) to the pains of manual scheduling. 

If you learned anything from this post, I hope it’s this – there are many opportunities to schedule a meeting with a prospect or customer, and different tools for every scenario. With the right tools at your disposal (and knowing when to use each one), you can strike the perfect balance between automation and personalization. 

If you nail it, the meetings, revenue, and rewards will soon follow. 

Not yet using Chili Piper? Click here to request a demo!